Satire: Dictatorship 101

So, you want to become a dictator. Before you can do so, there are some very important steps to consider before embarking on this very long journey. The steps will be covered in this lesson in the span of five sections: Pre-Power, Eliminating All Enemies, Building Your Dictatorship, Maintaining Your Dictatorship, and Making an Exit.

Pre-Power

Everyone knows that to get to the top you have to start at the bottom. Your first step is, of course, becoming a peasant. All you have to do is pick a country to inhabit (particularly one with a broken economy) and invest most of your money in the broken economy — or you can give it away. Once you have done that, you will have no choice but to start working for a living (this will come in handy later on).

Eventually you will get mad at the terrible government and you will become a revolutionary. This is an important step. You must hold many rallies and protests (getting arrested if necessary) and capture the attention of the party leader. If he likes what you have done, he will appoint you to a position in the party. After this, you must do all you can to help the party achieve a coup and take control of the government.

Continue working your way up the power chain and making a name for yourself. A few ways to do this would be making lots of public appearances, making a lot of friends within the party, and/or begin writing for a hip magazine. Once you have made a name for yourself and gathered a considerable amount of followers, you can start accusing those under you of being dissidents from the party and having them exiled. This will greatly aid your climb upwards, which leads us to our next section.

Eliminating All Enemies

Continue exiling your underlings until you are just about at the top. Then, have a large group of people attack the leader and burn his house down. This will force him to leave the country, as he will believe it is no longer safe. Once you have done that, you are now the de facto dictator.

Eliminate every single other person in the government except for people who you absolutely trust. Even if they have been loyal all the way, it will still lower the probability of a revolution. Now that you are the official dictator, you’re ready for the next step.

Building Your Dictatorship

This is perhaps the most involved step of this whole undertaking. First things first: You must create an identifiable logo/color that is easily recognizable as the insignia of your empire (i.e. Hitler’s swastika or Mao’s red). Next, put the insignia on the uniforms of all armed forces. After this, take the elite out of the armed forces and make a police force that will root out any dissidents and scare others from becoming dissidents.

A secret police force is very important. They will enforce the censorship of the media and literature; they will get rid of all the intellectuals and put them to work; and they will make sure everyone is reciting your Oath of Loyalty (be creative – they’ll have to say it no matter what).

This is the time when your dictatorship is booming. Almost everyone still believes you are amazing; and industrial and agricultural production should be good, too, since everyone is working on farms and in factories. Meanwhile, you can bask in your own personal wealth and power.

In your downtime, fashion a name for your dictatorship. Now that you have built your dictatorship, you are going to have to start working on its maintenance.

Maintaining Your Dictatorship

About this time people are going to start questioning you. Production has gone down because people are tired of working so much, and since you gave the police force so much power, they are starting to get out of control. What’s more, your close friends are going to start realizing how old and unhealthy you look, and they will begin jockeying for power.

Don’t lose faith! You can still make the best of the years you have left. It is now time to launch vigorous propaganda campaigns. You will have to work double time on convincing everyone that everything is a-okay.

Make posters depicting healthy men and women working hard and being loyal to you. Also, keep exporting resources to keep other countries disillusioned about your success. Just because there’s a nationwide famine doesn’t mean you have to ruin foreign relations.

This is also a good time to launch a Youth Education Program. The adults have already started heavily questioning you, so it’s time to start tapping in on those young, fresh, stupid minds. Take the manipulation as far as you can go. Make them say the oath of loyalty four, maybe even five times a day. Make sure your ideals are drilled in to their heads until they are practically vomiting it.

Make yourself an icon of fear if you have to — anything to keep the passion alive after you are dead and gone. This brings us to our last, but certainly not least, lesson.

Making an Exit

You’re old. You’re sickly. It’s time to go, and you know it. Now you have two choices: 1) select a successor and leave with a decent amount of peace and tranquility, or 2) launch a major, violent purge against a single group of people (religion or race, it doesn’t matter) and exile/execute them.

This will leave the country in shambles, and while you are resting quietly in your grave, they will be left with no choice but to piece the country back together, bit by bit. The first choice is obviously the more reasonable one, but the second is much more fun. It doesn’t matter, you’re the dictator; you can do whatever the hell you want! Which is one great thing about being a dictator.

Instead of making an exit, you can enlist in the help of a clone or a bona fide professional dictator impersonator. That way even if you’re gone, they’ll all think you’re still here and the fear level is maintained.

http://www.smorgasborgparty.smorgasborg.com Henry Mosher

Ahahaha
So true, so true.

Cindy D

Excellent!

The police don’t actually have to impose censorship on the media and literature, you can keep the intellectuals and let them do that willingly. So, if you change things like that around just a bit here and there, you can have an article about how to create a Republic or a Democracy.

ellevite

what happens to the soul of the dictator?, while the body rests in the grave, where will the soul be? Hell or heaven?